Tenaris:

ESN adoption framework development

CULTURAL BARRIERS TO ESN SUCCESS

Tenaris, a manufacturer and supplier of seamless and welded steel pipe products and provider of pipe handling, stocking and distribution services to the oil and gas, energy and mechanical industries, engaged us to create an adoption strategy for its enterprise social network, built on SharePoint 2010.

As a multinational company, headquartered in Argentina with plants across the world, the team steering the implementation of the ESN recognised that the cultural barriers to successful adoption of technology, collaboration and new ways of working were key to the success of the project.

CREATING ADOPTION TACTICS FOR A DIVERSE AUDIENCE

To create the initial adoption strategy, and in order to develop a tactics library ready for the launch of the platform, we conducted a user-centric discovery phase, starting with a stakeholder workshop with members of the IT, Communications, Engineering and HR teams, as well as the learning and development section of the company’s in-house University.

We then focused our discovery on the end-users in three regions, and four individual plants. The initial tactics library was created and over 100 different adoption activities were recommended for use at different levels in the organisation. We created an extensive use case catalogue, along with guidance on how to create, implement, and drive transformation and measure the success of use cases.

EVOLUTIONARY APPROACH TO ADOPTION

The final strategy was designed as a repeatable framework, so that the evolution of the platform, and the use cases it was applied to, could be supported using tactics in line with our findings on user behaviour, motivations and ways of working unique to some regions and plants.

Once the implementation of the platform had launched, the tactics library was shared via a network of community managers and was used extensively through the pilot phase to raise adoption, and increase the levels of engagement with each use case.

Better collaboration by design



End-users at the centre

Our user-centric requirements process focussed on actual needs, rather than a top-down roll-out of software features.